The Hubble Telescope has detected water and carbon dioxide on a distant gas giant. While this isn’t especially surprising, and the planet seems unlikely to support life…

…Mark Swain of the California Jet Propulsion Lab notes “The very fact that we’re able to detect it, and estimate its abundance, is significant for the long-term effort of characterizing planets, both to find out what they’re made of and to find out if they could be a possible host for life.”